Do Rats Know When They Don’t Know?

I think you were onto something yesterday when you suggested I should have just raised the bs flag rather than bother with a thorough debunking. Who here gives a damn about intelligent posts except for those already intelligent enough to see through the trolls and bullcrap? No one.

!!!

Eureka!

To excise the influence of food from the stimulus input chain


Checkmate again apparently

I think you were onto something yesterday when you suggested I should have just raised the bs flag rather than bother with a thorough debunking. Who here gives a damn about intelligent posts except for those already intelligent enough to see through the trolls and bullcrap? No one.

I've seen too many UFO and chemtrail threads and learned one thing: People don't want to overthrow their beliefs. You can go into long rational and logic arguments or raise the BS flag. You are called a shill either way

No, my comment on the 2A receptor was neuroscience.

I assumed they just did that for kicks, maybe they really don't get it.

Or was it just a snarky way of calling him a schizophrenic?

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I've seen too many UFO and chemtrail threads and learned one thing: People don't want to overthrow their beliefs. You can go into long rational and logic arguments or raise the BS flag. You are called a shill either way

I had pet rats some years ago. These cute little bastards are pretty smart, I would not be surprised much.

Me, too!!!!

You're on a roll, Face, with your recent threads.
Thanks for sharing :)

Or was it just a snarky way of calling him a schizophrenic?

And, if you'd like, I can get references.

Everything about him is snark, ignore him.

And reading lists:

[link to www.amazon.com]

….

Do Rats Know When They Don’t Know?

….

Humans are masters of metacognition: thinking about thinking. We can evaluate what we know and what we don’t know. If you don’t know how to get somewhere, you Google directions. When studying for a test, you have an idea of which material you’re most unsure of and devote more time to it.

Psychologists studying human metacognition usually rely on self-reports. Their subjects are able to simply tell the experimenter what they think. Studying metacognition in non-human animals is not as straightforward. How do you get an animal to “tell” you that it doesn’t know something? Instead of verbal reports, scientists interpret behavioral indicators of metacognition in animals.

[...]

In their first experiment, Roberts and his colleagues trained rats to press a lever at the central point in a T-maze. The lever delivered a food reward, but it also lit up one of the two alleys, indicating where the rats could go to obtain another piece of food. Once the rats had learned to press the lever and enter the lit alley, the researchers stopped rewarding them for the lever press. They wanted to see if the rats would continue to press the lever in order to gain information about the location of food.

Without the immediate reward for lever pressing, the rats didn’t press the lever as much, but they didn’t stop completely: they pressed the lever on a little under half the test trials (two control groups, meanwhile, decreased their lever pressing to near zero).

Roberts and his colleagues wondered why the rats didn’t press the lever every time to obtain the correct information they needed to find the food. They thought it might be related to the amount of information they obtained. The rats had only two choices, and pressing the lever narrowed it down to one choice. Even without pressing the lever, they had a 50/50 chance of choosing the correct arm randomly. Perhaps they would seek information more frequently if the amount of information they received for a response was greater.

So in their next experiment, Roberts and his colleagues put rats in an 8-arm radial maze. Again, they trained the rats to press a lever in the center of the maze for a reward and to light up one of the eight arms where another piece of food was hidden.

This time, after the immediate reward for lever pressing ended, the rats continued to press the lever at high rates.

Roberts says the finding that the rats pressed the lever almost twice as frequently on the radial maze as on the T maze suggests that the rats’ likelihood of information seeking was directly related to the amount of information gained.

[link to www.wired.com]